


a song for lovers

by jouissant



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Brazil, Fruit, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23858689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Francis and James take a trip to warmer climes.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 34
Kudos: 127
Collections: All Well: The Terror April 2020 Fest





	a song for lovers

**Author's Note:**

> For All Well Fest 2020, and also for icicaille, who prompted "vacation slice of life" a couple of weeks ago and laid the foundation for this highly indulgent story about love and mangoes.

Francis expects them to stay in Rio de Janeiro, but James grows fractious in the boarding house, paces and cannot sleep, casts off the sheets and the mosquito netting.

“This unnatural heat,” he says, though he looks fine in it, hair mussed and curling, blouson unlaced, skin shimmering with sweat.

He is brown already from sojourns topside on the passage from England. Francis is burned from the same, peeling like paint and monstrous, but nobody looks at him here anyway; there is enough colour and cacophony in the street that one Irishman in varying shades of pink may pass unnoticed. Francis, for his part, can look at no one but James. And when James bids him leave the city in which they have only just arrived, Francis can do nothing but follow.

They hire a skiff in the heat-haze of late morning. James negotiates in quickfire Portugese. Money changes hands. All are satisfied, and then they are skimming over a bay the same supernatural blue Francis last saw in the core of an iceberg. As ever he is taken by the vicissitudes of water. By its glassy flatness, by churning whirlpools, by grottoes along the coastline where dark rock looms and waves lap sweetly below.

“Where are we going?” Francis asks, leaning close. The boatman is perched at the nose of his craft, eyes down, slim fingers curved around a fishing spear.

James faces the horizon, dotted with islands like peppercorns. He does not turn to look at Francis. “I asked him to take us somewhere quiet.”

They put in at a lagoon, wade to shore across a milk-white sandbar. The water is warm as blood. The boatman lingers on the skiff and they watch him fish, bracing with the spear and thrusting it into the water over and over with the rapt savagery of a heron. When he’s finished he comes to shore himself and presents James with a brace of silver-bellied flatfish. Then he leaves them.

“What if he does not return?”

“Then I suppose we shall live here,” James says. He squints into the sky. “I can think of worse places, can’t you?” 

They watch until the skiff melts into the dancing chop beyond the lagoon. Then James shucks his clothes and jogs down to the water. Francis gathers James’s clothing and ventures further up the beach into the encroaching shade of a coconut palm. He sets down his rucksack and swaddles himself in linen, that he might not burn fully to a crisp. From this vantage point he watches James cavort at the tideline, watches the gleaming cap of his head as he swims out nearly to the breakers and back, arms pulling, striving, as he ever does, for some far shore Francis cannot see.

* * *

James in London, pale and anxious over tea, picking at a hangnail: “Were I to book passage to South America—”

Francis had been fretful and enthusiastic as a spaniel. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I’ll come.”

James had been so palpably relieved that Francis had not bothered with embarrassment over inviting himself, over the assumption James would want Francis by his side for this, his not-so-prodigal return.

It was strange to be at sea again as passengers. They shared a cabin on the premise of thrift and were not looked at crossways, though they kept to themselves and kept quiet. James made merry with crew and passengers alike, but Francis marked the tension limning him as they drew nearer the Brazilian coast.

The final night at sea they huddled close on deck, though the air was far too balmy to excuse them. “I know no one in Rio,” James said. “I know but one name. My damnable sire, and he is yet uncertain.” He sighed, dropped his head. “This voyage was a folly, Francis. I am sorry to have dragged you here.”

“Pah,” said Francis. He set his hand over James’s atop the railing. “We shall make our inquiries. Or not, as suits you. I should like to see the fortress at Niterói, and to eat a mango. Having accomplished these by your side I will count the enterprise a success.”

James turned to look at him. The only light was a lantern several paces back, and so Francis could not see James well, could not discern the intricacies of his expression. In the gloaming his hair and features seemed broadly wrought as in charcoal, and his voice, when he spoke, was thick to match.

“You are endlessly forbearing. To think, you follow me here when it is I who ought to follow you to the ends of the earth.”

Francis shrugged. “You already have.”

* * *

James picks his way back up the beach, his naked body crusted in sand and salt. His hair is a wild snarl. He carries another fish, one finger hooked in its cheek. “I caught it with my bare hands,” he says. “Just there, in the shallows.”

“Sit beside me a moment. Then we shall build a fire and roast them.”

James flops on his belly in the full heat of the sun. He pillows his head on his arms, shuts his eyes and gives a pleased groan. Presently he opens one eye and regards Francis. “Did you never wish to explore the tropics?”

“Too buggy by half. And you see how I fare in harsh sun. ”

“Well, we’d mosquitoes in the Arctic. Though you aren’t wrong. I did tell you of my troubles with malaria.”

“Marsh fever. I’d a mate who swore he caught it in a peat bog.”

“Wherever he caught it, he was not likely to wish his way back there.” He sighs. “Though I did so love it, Francis. The whole wide world.”

“You have not left it.”

“You know what I mean.” James settles deeper into the warm sand, which sifts about his body like sugar, sticking to his arse and the backs of his thighs.

He looks like a creature of myth, injured in some tempest and washed up here like flotsam for Francis to find. Francis would save him, nurse him to health in a cottage by the beach, and James would come to love him. But in time James would grow melancholy and long for the sea, and so at last Francis would have to relinquish him, to cast him back.

Francis gets to his feet. James does not move; he has shut his eyes again and appears to have fallen into a doze. Francis goes to comb the beach for wood; he fears he has lost his skill at survivalism but he manages a handy fire, guts the three fish and skewers them on a spit. He sits and tends the fire and in time the smell of cooking rouses James, who traipses over to Francis at the fireside, still quite nude and carrying the rucksack.

The fish are sweet and white and flaky. James and Francis eat with their hands, feed one another with oily, clumsy fingers, suck bones, kiss with that same sea-hunger Francis remembers from days on the water and in the clear air.

“I’ve a present for you,” James says.

He sits cross-legged, cock grown flushed and heavy from their fumbling. He is more vibrant in this place than Francis can recall. James draws an oval fruit from the rucksack, green and dusky red, skin taut with promise. He peels it neatly with the knife and offers a piece to Francis on the blade, yellow flesh brighter than anything Francis has ever seen.

“Marigold,” James says. “Makes me think of India. I ate myself sick on mangoes there.”

“Off them now, are you?”

“Hardly. But this one’s yours. Go on then.” James holds the blade up, urges the fruit to Francis’s lips and watches intently as he eats.

It’s as though James has pared away a slice of sun for him. The mango is perfectly ripe and melts against his tongue. Francis had candied mango once, and oh, what a wan ghost of the fruit he now eats! He would renounce it wholly, would have it outlawed for basest disrespect to the original. He moans and chases James’s fingers as they withdraw. 

“Good?”

“Christ, yes.” His voice is rough to his own ears.

James laughs. “You are virile yet, old man. Hot-blooded over a mango.” Juice has run over his hand and down his wrist. He cleans himself like a cat. Francis watches his darting pink tongue with rising ire.

“How am I expected to suffer you at these latitudes?” he growls at last, and James laughs again.

“Your only hope is to keep me here. Given time you may build up a tolerance.”

\--at which statement Francis, overcome, drags James into his lap. His skin is hot under Francis’s hands, body slick and yielding as pulp. He kicks out in his throes, dashing sand over the hissing fire. The mango rolls away, forgotten. The sun and moon swing on in orbit. The boatman comes into the harbor in the night, singing a song for lovers. He lays anchor far from shore to wait for morning.


End file.
